Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA)

S-LCA is a social impact assessment method that focuses on life cycle activities that affect people’s relative aspects related to human beings. It is developed as an assistant tool to support Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) by including the social perspectives of sustainability in the LCA methodological approach. However, S-LCA can also be used individually without integrating it with LCA. Sustainability assessment is an on-going development topic that advances the current approaches for assessing sustainability on a life-cycle basis. Therefore, well-being is considered one of the leading development goals of today’s modern societies. That required the evaluation that can be improved for well-being and social welfare. It supports it is a critical element of public policies and decision making by considering the social benefit and impacts and cultural elements, several critical social development values, and lifestyle. All affect the way social issues are being seen and evaluated. Furthermore, social impacts and supply chains are increasingly assessed by different stakeholders involved in sustainable development, such as the governments, non-governmental organizations, businesses, and academia.

LCA and S-LCA’s difference is that LCA is a Life cycle-based method developed to evaluate the environmental impacts (the environmental burden). LCA considers the supply chains, from the extraction of raw materials to products’ end-of-life (the waste management phase). The S-LCA is a social impacts-oriented method that shares a common